Let me make this perfectly clear: I disagree with absolutely nothing Inga
Muscio writes in Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (Seal Press,
1998).
There's not a damn thing wrong with anything
she's saying there. Really. I support the book 100%, think it should be
required reading for all humans who are still part of the US film industry's
favorite demographic.
That said, it's time I recognize that somewhere
along the line, I became an old broad. A long time ago, the whole goddess
thing deflated for me. I mean, really -- the whole god thing was a disaster
in the first place. The notion of replacing one totally fucked metanarrative
with a new and improved (but potentially fucked) metanarrative -- this held
limited interest, even though I could appreciate the attraction of bonding
with cosmic forces and feeling powerful while bleeding during a full moon.
I oversimplify for effect, of course.
And the whole cervix-gazing thing, that was
all right as far as it went, which wasn't very far, I must say, not without
strained eyes and a neckache. And while I'm on this subject, where is the
feminist collective of scientists whose major contribution to the planet
will be to redesign that fucking torture device we call a "speculum"? (We
can launch a cunt into space, but we can't build a g-spot-friendly speculum.)
But anyway, sure, a couple of decades ago I did the whole "taste yourself"
thing. And really, young bodies do need to be encouraged to Know Thy Temple,
etc. Of course we must all be taught to respect a body for which
our broader culture has no respect -- and of course we must stop
and think about our relationship to bodies, given a social context that
exploits bodies for consumptive and capitalist profit. Sure. Right on.
And yes, by all means, western medicine blows,
patriarchal intervention in reproductive freedom is a horror, and herbs
can promote an abortion if you really really concentrate all your lovely
female life energies into rinsing away that fetus. I am behind her on that
boycott of the massive male-profit-driven industry designed to complicate
and destroy a woman's loving relationship with her cunt. You go, grrl.
And yes, if I had youth to do all over again
I'd definitely do it as a bisexual and avoid as much of that nasty
masculinist energy as possible. I completely agree that "collectively --
when an entire society is sexually repressed -- phenomena such as war, rape,
racism, greed and wholesale shitty behavior are considered acceptable."
Like I said, everything Muscio has ever said
is completely neat, cool, and far out.
If what she doesn't talk about coheres
into a super-self-absorbing-tampon cacophony for an old broad like me, well,
that's just an old broad like me.
Her location of the cunt as a site of commonality
for all women, for instance, is an interestingly unresolved chord. She complains,
and don't we all, about the lack of generous vocabulary with which women
might describe themselves -- and then concludes that women may be of varying
races, classes, sexualities, abilities, and layers of wonderfulness -- that
"Womankind is varied and vast. But we all have cunts."
Do we? I wonder how intersexuals, transsexuals
and transgendered peoples -- a significant, and significantly erased, population
of humankind -- would respond to this. I applaud this attempt at taking
back from the patriarchy the right to synecdoche, and the right to define
ourselves as our parts, even as I wonder whether mimicking masculinist metonymy
really forwards our cause of self-definition.
But OK, for the sake of discussion, let's
assume for now that all women have cunts. Do, and should, all women maintain
the same relationship to their cunts? At all life-times? "Generally speaking,"
Muscio writes (and she is always correct), "we don't understand them, we
don't like them, and we often think they're ugly." She suggests a change
in attitude. "A different, more sublime way of looking at this is that our
cunts are the symbolic and physical zenith of our existence."
Justifiable hyperbole, I'm sure, but even
if we lower the heat on the sublimation a tad, do I really want my cunt
to be the symbolic and physical center of my universe? Would that be personally
and collectively healthy? Will we be able to locate real social reform in
that sublime?
Well, hell, I'm sure it's a good start for
people who are still deciding what this thing, this big bulky thing that
seems to follow your brain around, what this thing is and what to do with
it. So in this way, as I keep saying, I support Muscio's work absolutely.
When she argues, in the most moving section of her book, that cunts need
to understand their (masculinist) opponents in order to protect ourselves
from rape -- and that learning chess will teach us to "think like the predators"
-- well, that's me applauding in the back row. For the short term, forewarned
is forearmed. But what systemic revision results from surrendering to the
opponent -- by agreeing to engage in the oppositional relations from which
the enemy himself profits?
And of course Muscio is also right to key
on language as a primary weapon in the rape of bodies. I applaud her desire
to take the word back. Just last week, a galpal called me up and was bitching
about some bitch, and when she said, "She's such a cunt," I was actually
confused for a moment, since Muscio has convinced me that Martha Stewart's
cunt is A Good Thing. We should all be so confused when "cunt" is deployed
as a derogative. Only a cunt would call a cunt a cunt. (Pardon?)
Indeed, Muscio confesses that the chapter
that gave her the most trouble was "Acrimony of Cunts." Women have been
coached to be hard as hell on one another, and crone-cunts are the front
line in the control of kid-cunts. Patriarchy loves a catfight, because nothing
buttresses a patriarch's perch better than setting the chickens to pecking
at each other. Thus, you will note again, I agree with every damn thing
Muscio says. I think she's wonderful and I hope she writes five more books
just like this one.
By way of enacting my strong support for her
work, permit me to raise some issues she might pursue, for instance, in
Volume 2. Volume 2, I'm sure, will not reinforce our youth-obsessed culture
by defining cunt solely as a well-lubed, breeding bleeder; rather, it will
discuss, in sage retrospect, the ways in which a cunt's relationship to
her part changes over a lifetime. Volume 2 will consider myriad alternative
cultural constructions of cunt, including non-white, non-western, non-middleclass
relations to that part. Volume 2 will complicate the cunt/no-cunt binary,
will explore the cuntpart in relation to the whole (pardon the homophone)
person; and will not assume a concept of wholeness not experienced by all,
such as cunts differently abled. Thus, Volume 2 will undo the alienations
inherent in the elevation of breed-cunt as unifying theory.
The problem is not with ourselves, you know,
but with our forms of navigation. The dick has long served as the definer
of (our) society, has long been the needle illustrating cultural magnetic
north, the needle we all measure progress against. Replacing dick with cunt,
or even equalizing dick with cunt, contributes little, for the long term,
to envisioning a relational future, one of infinite variance and reciprocal
mutuality, one in which "equality" would be a moot point, since opposition
would not be the dominant paradigm. Real reform will require a social organization
with the ability to locate a more celestial means of social navigation.
But yes, meanwhile, in the short term, the
young among us must take back their cunts and the discourses thereof, while
us old cunts will, I'm sure, write our own old-cunt-narratives, narratives
with which Muscio will, I'm sure, wholeheartedly agree.
Just as this old cunt agrees, 100%, with hers.
Way to go, cunt.